On The Spirit of Place
Dec. 18th, 2019 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteeleIf you think sensing the spirit of place is beyond your ability, ask yourself one question: At any time during your early childhood, did you have a friend whose house was considered the best? If you knew that friend with a “cool mom” whose house was laid back and friendly, that was you sensing the spirit of place. The spirit of a place is rooted in the pragmatic: what happened there, who lives there, and what their general attitude tends to be. Even for someone who does not consider themselves a psychic at all, an abandoned mental hospital with crumbling walls, decrepit cot beds with rubber straps languishing in the corners, and piles of syringes lying in a puddle in the middle of the mildewed hallway is not going to be a comfortable place to spend an afternoon. There are both seen and unseen factors that make the abandoned mental hospital a scary place to be, and one of them is the invisible energy that torture and incarceration attracts. Scientists of our era frantically deny any such energy exists, even though over sixty percent of people believe they have seen a ghost and one out of three report they have either lived or stayed in a haunted house (research by OnePoll on behalf of Groupon of 2000 people). I’ll guess that near 100% have sensed the spirit of place, regardless of clairvoyant ability of belief. Of course some people are more sensitive than others, just as some people are better at math or knitting than others, but everyone has got some ability where spirit of place is concerned. It follows that sensitivity to the spirit of place can be developed and refined.
I was born insensitive in some ways and oversensitive in others. For instance, my hearing is so acute, I have to sleep with earplugs and become extremely stressed when in noisy spaces, including American movie theaters with surround sound. I am an extremely high functioning autistic, and that has caused me to often misread people’s verbal or physical signals and subtexts, a form of often devastating insensitivity. I am extremely sensitive to the spirit of place. I’m not a neatnik, but clutter bothers me enough that I keep my small house at a constant wabi-sabi level of clean, because any more clutter than that would disrupt the good feeling of the rooms of my home. Conversely, I will never live in a Mies Van Der Rohe minimalist space if I can help it, because I am confident the bareness and sharp angles would impede my ability to concentrate and/or sleep at night.
I can sense the aura of a neighborhood much like one can sense the nature of a person by knowing them over many years. The area where I grew up has changed radically in the half-century I have been alive; it has changed to the point where I can no longer comfortably spend a significant amount of time there. I grew up in a distant suburb of Chicago. If I fictionalized the place I grew up, she would be a Baby Boomer era woman with an idyllic childhood. Her teenage years were staid and placid, nevertheless, she grew into a compassionate, earthy, pragmatic young woman with her heart in the right place. This all went down the toilet when she married a scientist and stumbled into wealth beyond her wildest dreams. She about-faced from her former hippie ideals and replaced her old compassion with a new and miserable standard of racing the Joneses. She’s enjoyed prosperity and wealth, but she’s also been immersed by the byproducts that come from being engaged in constant competition with rich idiots. Though she speaks much rhetoric to indicate otherwise, she is a snob and a racist. She is all quaintness and charm as long as you don’t scratch her surface. She’s a woman who has had every single appetite in life satisfied except the ones that matter. She’s not just hungry; she’s ravenous. That’s why I don’t like spending time in my hometown. She feels hungry for whatever I’ve got.
I also don’t care for Chicago, which is where I went to University. Chicago is a fast-talking, slick, sophisticated middle-aged man to me. He’s Plutonian, charismatic, and powerful. He’s no wimp or shrinking violet either. He has zero problem getting his hands dirty. Though I like those things in a man, I consider Chicago to be my ex-boyfriend. We have had a passionate relationship at times, but in the end, he wasn’t for me. I don’t see him much anymore, and when I do, I try not to get deeply involved.
Where I live now is an old woman. She’s what I hope to become — a crazy cat lady and a wise old witch. Her beauty is hidden under a rough at the edges exterior. People are afraid of her because she is fierce. She doesn’t tolerate bull. She is nurturing and she welcomes me home every night. We are just getting to know each other and I hope to know her much better in the future.
Portraying a city or a town as a person is common enough in writing to be a trope. I’ve read enough novelists of varying talent who have called London or Paris an “old whore” to roll my eyes when I see the cliché in print.
Beyond towns, streets have spirits of place. So do individual living spaces such as houses or apartments. There are a couple of streets where I work that genuinely feel good. There isn’t anything special about them — one is a hill with some schools and malls on either side and the other is a somewhat busy thoroughfare that splits a couple of townhouse subdivisions. Why they feel warm and pleasant is a mystery, much like why my current town feels like an old woman.
A childhood friend of mine has a bad family. Lots of shouting, verbal and sexual abuse, and the kids often ran away. I went to her house once and it felt like living a nightmare. The worst part of it was the thin veneer of stability they slapped on for the brief period of hosting a guest. Sadly, I can see someone preferring to grow up homeless than to grow up in that house. If her house was a person, it would be John Wayne Gacy. The experience of meeting my friend’s family was so traumatic, I wasn’t able to process the information I took in for many years. I can’t imagine trying to grow up there. She deserves a medal for even making an attempt to stay in that house as a young person, though what choice did she have? She had no control over what happened then, however, she can control what happens now and so can I; so can you.
The smallest of efforts can make a place much better and improve its spirit. A classic case in point is Christmas lights. Even the most pathetic, single string of giant bulbs from the year 1983 thrown on a lopsided arbor vitae lift the mood of the general area. Electric lights produce such a tangible effect, manipulative corporations rely upon lighting up stores like constant fourth of July fireworks displays in order to make it seem like happy things happen at Walmart. Another small action that helps lift the mood of the general area is gardening. Personally, I appreciate the smallest and most bungled attempts at gardening when I see it on other people’s patios or in their front yards. When you go through the trouble of planting violets or canna lilies in a pot and watering them for a month or three, that is care manifested on the physical plane. You may see it as insignificant but I don’t. Every little bit helps, and conversely, every little bit hurts. That’s why it’s so frustrating and annoying for some of us to see a new mini-mall or being installed in an area that already teems with half-abandoned mini-malls. When the tiniest scrap of fragile, wild space is subject to being asphalted over for the almighty force of Profit, it reflects the attitude of a generation and an age. Ripping out one’s front lawn in order to replace it with native plants (if the city zoning and homeowner’s association overlords allow it!) becomes an device of rebellion against the prevailing spirit of our age that wants to stamp out wildness and individuality at every turn. We are in a psychological war where every consumer lifestyle choice is a test of what side we are on; if you think about it too hard, it is easy to become overwhelmed. The average person isn’t conscious of this war, but that doesn’t stop it from going on all around them. Nevertheless, perhaps that is a topic for a future post.
East Asians of various flavors have traditional notions of household gods. Japanese call these spirits “kami”. Western atheist and Christian know-it-alls have done their level best to stamp out the idea of kami residing in homes this side of the oceans, however, the West has its own rich traditions of fairies, elves, brownies, and ghosts as counterpart to Eastern tales of ancestors hanging out after death and prankster fox spirits. I have gone through my own phases of belief and disbelief about such disembodied creatures and am currently in a belief phase. What changed for me is that I realized that I don’t have to believe in non-embodied entities for them to exist: pragmatic evidence from every world culture except for our current Western industrial one shows they do, and though they can’t be proven (because they’re not physical) it makes sense to try to figure out what they are and what they are possibly saying. There is no proof, there is only This Stuff Works. Most people talk to their cats and dogs, and they talk to themselves. I talk to my cat (I don’t have a dog at this time), I talk to myself, and I also talk to the spirits in my house. I have a relationship with the spirits of my house just as I have a relationship with my cat. I also talk to the spirit of my car and thank her after I’ve finished driving her for the day. I talk to trees when I visit them in the forest preserve and yes, sometimes they answer back. Do I hear voices? No, I do not, though every now and then I’ll have an episode of clairaudience, like when I hear birds in trees in the middle of night in winter or music that isn’t there before going to sleep. Hearing what spirits have to say is like tuning into a radio station. I have to carefully filter out my own thoughts and wishful thinking, including my negative wishful thinking and fetish for portents of doom. There is also the important consideration that not all of these spirits wish me well and the whopping majority are as omnipotent as I am, which is to say they aren’t at all omnipotent. Spirit voices can be a scary place, and I went through that place when I was sixteen and began to study the occult via Gardnerian Wicca. Opening those channels resulted in mostly bad experiences for me, and because of my skepticism, I was ill prepared to deal with both spirit attacks and the consequences of my own stupid intentions. Thankfully, I did not end up dead or permanently messed up, but looking back, I shudder at how easily that could have happened. After my nearly 20 years of atheism, I began studying Druid magic and with it, the Sphere of Protection, a well-known invocation/banishing ritual that has changed my life for the better.... but that is a long story. Once again, I’d like to save that for another post!
If you’ve ever seen a ghost or felt a space you lived in was haunted, I invite you to share your experience in the comments.
Not a house in which I lived, a house in which I toured.
Date: 2020-06-27 06:55 am (UTC)I and my then significant other were searching for a house to buy. We came across one that met our price range and location requirements, and drove to the location. Instantly we felt something off about the entire subdivision. It had a level of decay uncharacteristic of its surrounding area. We went into the house for sale and were greeted by a friendly neighborhood cat who had wandered into the house. This cat was accompanied by the slimiest looking and feeling realtor I've ever met. It's not that he did anything untoward, mind you. It's that he and indeed the house itself felt very wrong.
He invited us to have a look around. Instead of doing the normal thing and investigating the rooms sequentially, I felt a psychic pull leading me directly into the kitchen, and down the stairs into the basement. As I descended the stairs a feeling of menace crept all around me. When I entered the basement, I discovered that it was semi-finished, with various bits of drywall and insulation both in and out of repair. As I went through the basement I had the terrible feeling that this was a murder house. My then-partner came down to look for me and she too felt the same thing. We exited the basement, looked at a few of the upstairs rooms, and they too felt sinister if only in a more muted way.
We left, and as we drove we both felt as though something from that house had followed us. It felt like an oozing sludge and pile of shrouds. She was not a practicing religious person, but she was a confirmed Catholic and she suggested finding a cathedral and attending mass. I did not object to this at all, hoping that perhaps something about the experience would help. In fact, it did. Not only did the terrible presence dissipate as we walked through the door, so too did a spirit of grief that had been haunting me from a past trauma. In my mind's eye, I could see it shrieking, angry that it couldn't follow me in.
In spite of this event, I still cannot call myself a Christian. However, I have a much more open view of the metaphysical than I did those years ago. I have an appreciation for the general ethos of cause and effect and of the universe as mind that one finds in occult practices, and also an appreciation for forgiveness as taught by Jesus. My Tarot readings as well, are a lot more on point now that I no longer hold them as a curiosity.
Re: Not a house in which I lived, a house in which I toured.
Date: 2020-06-28 04:44 am (UTC)Catholics who do the old version of the mass (the Tridentine version) are actually doing an extremely powerful and effective protection ritual. Combined with prayer, I can see the collective egregore throwing any demon out on its butt. Jesus is a kind god and he often protects people who ask for it. The same is true of his mother Mary. My issue with Christians is when they try to convince me Jesus is the ONLY god or the BEST one. From my experience, Jesus is far from the only god. When an entity is stalking me, I call on my patron goddesses Demeter or Elen. Demons are terrified of them and with good reason -- they're both much, much more powerful than any demon.
The next time you walk through a forest, you might want to try communicating with a tree. Tree communication is great practice for communicating with larger spaces. You are obviously empathic and sensitive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtVVdpc2bU4
Re: Not a house in which I lived, a house in which I toured.
Date: 2020-06-29 05:16 am (UTC)Jesus' followers don't do him justice. I get it, following his examples and commandments would not have been sustainable had everyone done it as commanded. Yet, after a point the message gets completely lost and the actions become counterproductive.
I'll be sure to talk to the trees outside, there are quite a lot around here.
I may have some level of empathic sensitivity. I did sense a terrible occurrance right around when I discovered my high school best friend had died. Same with my maternal grandparents. I felt the moment of my grandfather's passing, and spoke a bard's tongue premonition of my grandmother's passing on the day of her death. But as for channeling this, I have no idea how I would do so.
On creating and cleaning space
Date: 2020-12-01 08:27 pm (UTC)This is a great essay. I read it back in the summer and gave it a re-read today due to a recent tarot reading/counseling session from an intuitive person (who I trust) and so I'm working through the information she provided to me.
She said she received information that I was inclined towards the creation and cleansing of space in a variety of ways. She described it as a sort of spiritual handyman, which is interesting as handyman work is part of my skill set and business model. Adding a spiritual element is sensible to me, especially in the current times with all the messy energy out there. I'm not exactly sure how to pursue this line of work, though. Currently I do the SOP daily with the Norse pantheon, a daily tarot draw and I've been doing the Essenes teachings for about a year. I need to make improvements in my meditation practices and hone my focus and will training. I'm probably going to post this question next magic Monday on JMG's blog, but I would like to solicit your thoughts (or reading suggestions) as well. Thanks! -Kerry
Re: On creating and cleaning space
Date: 2020-12-01 09:25 pm (UTC)